I-Corps: Light responsive nanoparticle depot for controlled delivery of drugs to the eye

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

The only viable option for the treatment for many eye-related diseases involves the injection of drugs directly into the eye (intravitreal injections). These are difficult procedures for the doctor to perform and extremely uncomfortable for the patients receiving these treatments. As a result, there are issues with patient compliance and the risk of complications is high, both resulting in millions of dollars inefficiently spent on secondary medical costs. Furthermore, due to the fact that dosing is difficult to control, doctors will often use the maximum "safe" dose when treating these diseases to ensure efficacy, which unfortunately leads to strong and undesirable side effects from these potent drugs. Therefore, there is a need for a technology which can reduce the number of injections needed in the treatment regimen, as well as the ability to accurately control the amount of therapeutic drug introduced, while maintaining the same level of efficacy. These combined capabilities would relieve patients from unnecessary pain and suffering, reduce the chance for complications, and as a result, lead to increased patient compliance and improved clinical outcomes. One of the most severe of these eye diseases which require periodic intravitreal injections is the wet form of Age-related Macular Degeneration (wet AMD). Irreversible vision loss may occur if patients miss even one of their monthly prophylactic treatments. The proposed technology "AMDepot" is a drug delivery platform based on a proprietary, light-responsive polymer.Therapeutic drugs are loaded into the polymer in nanoparticle form, and released in a highly controlled manner upon exposure to light. This system allows the therapy to be administered repeatedly through the shining of a specific form of light into the eye, significantly reducing the number of intravitreal injections needed. The purpose of this study would be to investigate and validate the real-world need of a technology which can mitigate adverse effects from intravitreal injections by reducing the number of injections needed and replacing it with light-controlled dosing. While this technology could be useful in many disease settings, this I-Corps team will focus its initial efforts in the realm of wet AMD. To accomplish this, a detailed plan has been devised to interview some of the world-leading ophthalmologists at top U.S. eye centers, as well as AMD patients in several local support groups in Southern California to gain further insights into the problem and to validate the proposed hypotheses.